Transcriber’s Notes
Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
THE GREEN OVERCOAT.
The
Green Overcoat
By
HILAIRE BELLOC
_With Illustrations by_
G.K. CHESTERTON
NEW YORK
MCBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1912
_All rights reserved_
Dedicated to
MAURICE BARING.
DEDICATION.
MY DEAR MAURICE,
You wrote something called _The Green Elephant_, and I have written
something called _The Green Overcoat_.
It is on this account that I dedicate to you my work _The Green
Overcoat_, although (and I take this opportunity of reproaching you for
the same) you did not dedicate to me your work _The Green Elephant_.
An overcoat and an elephant have much in common, and also, alas!
much in which they differ. An elephant can be taken off, and so can
an overcoat; but, on the other hand, an overcoat can be put on, and
an elephant can not. I understand that your elephant was not a real
elephant; similarly my overcoat is not a real overcoat, but only an
overcoat in a book. An overcoat is the largest kind of garment, and an
elephant is the largest kind of beast, unless we admit the whale, which
is larger than the elephant, just as a dressing-gown is larger than an
overcoat; but this would lead me far! Then, again, the elephant does
not eat meat, or bite; nor does an overcoat. He is most serviceable
to man; so is an overcoat. There are, however, rogue elephants which
are worse than useless, and give less profit to their owner than if
he had no elephant at all. The same is true of overcoats, notably of
those which have got torn in the lining of the left armpit, so that
the citizen on shoving his left arm therein gets it into a sort of
_cul-de-sac_, which is French for blind-alley.
The elephant is expensive, so is the overcoat. The elephant is of a
grave and settled expression, so is an overcoat. An overcoat hanging by
itself upon a peg is a grave and sensible object, which in the words of
the philosopher “neither laughs nor is the cause of laughter.” So is an
elephant encaged.
Again, man in conjunction with the elephant is ennobled by that
conjunction, whether he ride upon its back or upon its neck or walk by
its side, as does the keeper at the Zoo. The same is true of overcoats,
which, whether we have them upon our backs or carry them over our arms,
add something to our appearance. I could suggest many other points
in common were this part of my work lucrative, and, as it were, in
the business; but it is not, and I must end. I might remind you that
elephants probably grow old (though no man has lived to see it), that
overcoats certainly do; that elephants are of divers sex, and this is
true also of the overcoat. On the other hand, an overcoat has no feet
and it has two tails or none, whereas the elephant has four feet and
but one tail, and that a very little one.
I must wind up by telling you why I have written of an “overcoat” and
not a “greatcoat.” “Greatcoat” is the more vernacular; “overcoat” I
think the more imperial. But that was not my reason. I wrote “overcoat”
because it was a word similar in scansion and almost equivalent in
stress-scheme (wow!) to the word “elephant.” Of course, if I had
considered length of syllable and vowel-value it would have been
another matter, for “elephant” consists in three shorts, “overcoat” in
a long, short and long. The first is a what-you-may-call-’um, and the
second a thingumbob.
But I did not consider vowel sounds, and I was indifferent to longs and
shorts. My endeavour was to copy you, and to have a title which would
get people mixed up, so that the great hordes of cultivated men and
women desiring to see your play should talk by mistake of _The Green
Overcoat_.
And then their aunts, or perhaps a prig-visitor, would say: “Oh, no,
that is the _book_!” In this way the book would be boomed. That was my
game.
If people had done this sort of thing before it would not work now; but
they haven’t.
Now, Maurice, I end this preface, for I cannot think of anything more
to write.
H. BELLOC.
CONTENTS.
_Page_
CHAPTER I.
IN WHICH THE GREEN OVERCOAT TAKES A JOURNEY 13
CHAPTER II.
IN WHICH A PHILOSOPHER WRESTLES WITH THE
PROBLEM OF IDENTITY 29
CHAPTER III.
IN WHICH THE GREEN OVERCOAT APPEARS AS A
POINT OF RELIGION BY NOT BEING THERE 46
CHAPTER IV.
IN WHICH IT IS SEEN THAT UNIVERSITY TRAINING
FITS ONE FOR A BUSINESS CAREER 67
CHAPTER V.
IN WHICH SOLITUDE IS UNABLE TO DISCOVER THE
CHARMS WHICH SAGES HAVE SEEN IN HER FACE 84
CHAPTER VI.
IN WHICH PROFESSOR HIGGINSON BEGINS TO TASTE
THE SWEETS OF FAME 104
CHAPTER VII.
IN WHICH PROFESSOR HIGGINSON GOES ON TASTING
THEM 135
CHAPTER VIII.
IN WHICH PROFESSOR HIGGINSON GETS THOSE SWEETS
BY THE WAGON-LOAD, AND ALSO HEARS HOW MEN
ARE MADE 158
CHAPTER IX.
IN WHICH THE GREEN OVERCOAT BEGINS TO ASSERT
ITSELF 175
CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH A DESCENDANT OF THE CRUSADERS REFUSES
TO HARBOUR STOLEN GOODS 186
CHAPTER XI.
IN WHICH A POLE IS LESS SCRUPULOUS 204
CHAPTER XII.
IN WHICH THE READERKIN WILL, IF HE HAS AN OUNCE
OF BRAINS, BEGIN TO CATCH THE INEVITABLE
DENOUMONG OF THE IMBROGLIO 215
CHAPTER XIII.
IN WHICH THE SUBLIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS GIVES
ITSELF AWAY 243
CHAPTER XIV.
IN WHICH, INCREDIBLE AS IT MAY SEEM, A NON-POLE
HAS THE BETTER OF A POLE 264
CHAPTER XV.
IN WHICH THREE YOUNG MEN EAT, AND NOT ONLY
EAT, BUT DRINK 274
CHAPTER XVI.
IN WHICH CROSS-EXAMINATION IS CONDUCTED “EN
ÉCHELON,” AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT
MEANS I CAN’T HELP YOU 287
CHAPTER XVII.
IN WHICH A PROFESSOR PROFESSES NOTHING, A
LECTURE IS NOT DELIVERED, AND YET SOMETHING
HAPPENS 298
CHAPTER XVIII.
IN WHICH THE GREEN OVERCOAT TRIUMPHS AND
COMES HOME 321
The Green Overcoat.
CHAPTER I.
_In which the Green Overcoat takes a Journey._
Professor Higginson—to give him his true name—was a psychologist,
celebrated throughout Europe, and recently attached to the modern and
increasingly important University called the Guelph University, in the
large manufacturing town of Ormeston. His stipend was £800 a year.
He was a tall, thin man, exceedingly shy and nervous, with weary,
print-worn eyes, which nearly always looked a little pained, and
were generally turned uneasily towards the ground. He did not dress
carefully. He was not young. He had a trick of keeping both hands in
his trouser pockets. He stooped somewhat at the shoulders, and wore
a long, grey beard. He was a bachelor, naturally affectionate by
disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet
were exceedingly large, and his mind was nearly always occupied by the
subject which he professed.
This excellent man, in his ill-fitting evening suit, had just said
good-bye after an agonised party, upon Monday, the 2nd of May, at the
house of Sir John Perkin, a local merchant of ample but ill-merited
fortune.
It was as yet but midnight, the rooms were full, and he hoped to slip
out early and almost unobserved.
Professor Higginson sidled aimlessly into the study that was doing duty
as a cloakroom, sidled out again on remembering that he had not left
his things there, and next turned to gaze almost as aimlessly at a
series of pegs on which he hoped to find a familiar slouch hat, rather
greasy, and an equally familiar grey Inverness which was like his skin
to him. The slouch hat was there. The Inverness was gone.
Was it gone? The Professor of Psychology was a learned man, and his
sense of reality was not always exact. Had he come in that Inverness
after all?... The more he thought about it the less certain he was.
He remembered that the May night, though very cold, had been fine as
he came. He had no precise memory of taking off that Inverness or of
hanging it up. He walked slowly, ruminating upon the great problem.
Towards the door of the hall; he inwardly congratulated himself that
there was no servant present, and that he could go through the dreadful
ordeal of leaving the house without suffering the scrutiny of a human
being. No carriage had yet drawn up. He opened the door, and was
appalled to be met by a violent gust and a bitter, cold, driving rain.
Now the Professor of Psychology was, like the domestic cat, of simple
tastes, but he hated rain even more than does that animal. It bitterly
disagreed with him, and worse still, the oddity of walking through the
streets in evening clothes through a raging downpour, with a large
expanse of white shirt all drenched, was more than his nerves could
bear.
He was turning round irresolutely to seek once again for that
Inverness, which he was now more confident than ever was not there,
when the Devil, who has great power in these affairs, presented to
his eyes, cast negligently over a chair, a GREEN OVERCOAT of singular
magnificence.
The green of it was a subdued, a warm and a lovely green; its cloth
was soft and thick, pliable and smooth; the rich fur at the collar and
cuffs was a promise of luxury in the lining.
Now the Devil during all Professor Higginson’s life had had but
trifling fun with him until that memorable moment. The opportunity,
as the reader will soon discover, was (from the Devil’s point of
view) remarkable and rare. More, far more, than Professor Higginson’s
somewhat sterile soul was involved in the issue.
The Green Overcoat appeared for a few seconds seductive, then violently
alluring, next—and in a very few seconds—irresistible.
Professor Higginson shot a sin-laden and frightened glance towards the
light and the noise and the music within. No one was in sight. Through
the open door of the rooms, whence the sound of the party came loud
and fairly drunken, he saw no face turned his way. The hall itself was
deserted. Then he heard a hurl of wind, a dash of rain on the hall
window. With a rapidity worthy of a greater game, and to him most
unusual, he whisked the garment from the chair, slipped into the shadow
of the door, struggled into the Green Overcoat with a wriggle that
seemed to him to last five weeks—it was, as a fact, a conjuror’s trick
for smartness—and it was on! The Devil saw to it that it fitted.
It was all right. He would pretend some mistake, and send it back the
_very first thing_ next morning; nay, he would be an honest man, and
send it back _at once_ by a messenger the moment he found out his
mistake on getting to his lodgings. So wealthy an overcoat could only
belong to a great man—a man who would stay late, very late. Come, the
Green Overcoat would be back again in that house before its owner had
elected to move. He would be no wiser! There was no harm done, and he
could not walk as he was through the rain.
Alas! These plausible arguments proceeded, had the Professor but known
it, from the Enemy of Souls! _He_, the fallen archangel, foresaw that
coming ruin to which his lanky and introspective victim was unhappily
blind. Dons are cheap meat for Devils.
The door shut upon the learned man. He went striding out into the
drenching storm, down the drive towards the public road. And as he went
he carried a sense of wealth about him that was very pleasurable in
spite of the weather. He had never known such raiment!
His way down the road to his lodgings would be a matter of a mile or
more. The rain was intolerable. He was wondering as he reached the
gate whether there was any chance of a cab at such an hour, when he
was overjoyed to hear the purring of a taxi coming slowly up behind
him. He turned at once and hailed it. The taxi halted, and drew up a
little in front of a street light, so that the driver’s face was in
shadow. He gave his address, opened the door and stooped to fold up his
considerable stature into the vehicle.
He had hardly shut the door, and as he was doing so, felt, or thought
he felt, some obstacle before him, when the engine was let out at full
speed. The cab whirled suddenly round in the opposite direction from
that which he had ordered, and as Professor Higginson was jolted back
by the jerk into his seat, his left arm clutched at what was certainly
a human form; at the same moment his struggling _right_ arm clutched
_another_, crouched apparently in the corner of the cab.
He had just time to begin, “I beg your——” when he felt each wrist held
in a pair of strong hands and a shawl or cloth tightening about his
mouth. All that he next attempted to say was lost to himself and to the
world. He gave one vigorous kick with his long legs; before he could
give a second his feet were held as firmly as his hands, and he felt
what must have been a handkerchief being tied uncomfortably tightly
round his ankles, while his wrists were still held in a grasp that
suggested something professional.
Professor Higginson’s thoughts were drawn out of their daily groove.
His brain raced and pulsed, then halted, and projected one clear
decision—which was to sit quite quiet and do nothing.
The driver’s back showed a black square against the lamp-lit rain. He
heard, or would hear, nothing. He paid no heed to the motions within,
but steered furiously through the storm. For ten good minutes nothing
changed.
The beating rain outside blurred the window-panes, and the pace at
which they drove forbade the Philosopher any but the vaguest guesses at
the road and the whereabouts.
The public lights of the town had long since been left behind; rapid
turns had begun to suggest country lanes, when, after a sharper jolt
than usual, the machine curved warily through a gate into a narrow way,
the brakes were put on sharply, the clutch was thrown out, and the cab
stopped dead. It was halted and its machine was panting down in some
garden, the poverty and neglect of which glared under the acetylene
lamps. The disordered, weedy gravel of the place and its ragged laurels
stood out unnaturally, framed in the thick darkness. The edge of the
light just caught the faded brick corner of an old house.
Professor Higginson had barely a second in which to note a flight
of four dirty stone steps leading to a door in the shadow, when his
captors spoke for the first time.
“Will you go quietly?” said the one crouching before him—he that had
tied his ankles.
The Professor assented through his gag with a voice like the distant
lowing of a cow. The strong grip that held his wrists pulled his arms
behind him, the taxi door was opened, and he was thrust out, still
held by the hands. He poised himself upon his bound feet, and whoever
it was that had spoken—he had a strong, young voice, and looked broad
and powerful in the half-light behind the lamps—began unfastening the
handkerchief at his ankles. Professor Higginson was not a soldier. He
was of the Academies. He broke his parole.
The moment his feet were free he launched a vigorous kick at his
releaser (who hardly dodged it), emitted through his gag a dull sound
full of fury, and at the same instant found himself bumped violently
upon the ground with his legs threshing the air in all directions. It
was the gentleman who held his wrists behind him that was the author
of this manœuvre, and even as he achieved it he piped out in a curious
high voice that contrasted strangely with the strength he had just
proved—
“Hit him, Jimmy! Hit him in the face!”
“Not yet,” said Jimmy ominously. “Jerk him up, Melba!”
At some expense to the Professor’s nerves Melba obeyed, and the learned
Pragmatist found himself once more upon his feet. He kicked out
vigorously behind, but only met the air. It was as he had dreaded! He
had to deal with professionals!
“All right, Jimmy?” came in a young, well-Englished and rather tired
drawl from the driver.
The engine was still panting slightly.
“Yes, Charlie,” said Jimmy cheerfully. “Off you go!”
“Good night,” said the young, well-Englished and rather tired drawl
again.
The clutch caught, the engine throbbed faster, the untidy gravel
crunched under the motor as it turned a half circle to find the gate,
and in doing so cast a moment of fierce light upon the stained and
dirty door of the house.
The gagged victim noted that the door was open: there had been
preparation, and the signs of it did not reassure him.
His captor thrust him against that door, into the dark hall within. The
other one, the one he had heard called “Jimmy” followed, shut the door,
and struck a match.
There was revealed in the flare a passage between perfectly bare
walls, dusty, uncarpeted floor boards, still bearing the faint marks
of staining at their edges, a flight of stairs with flimsy bannisters,
many of them broken—for the rest, nothingness.
“Melba” (if I may call that gentleman by the name his associate had
given him) was busy at the Professor’s wrists with something more
business-like than a handkerchief. He was tying them up scientifically
enough (and very tight) with a piece of box-cord.
Jimmy, opening the door of a room on the ground floor that gave into
this deserted passage, lit a candle within. Mr. Higginson found himself
pushed through that door on to a chair in the room beyond. A moment
later he was bound to that chair, corded up in a manner uncomfortably
secure to its rungs and back by his ankles, elbows and knees. It was
Melba that did the deed. Jimmy, coming in after, turned the key in the
door, and joined his companion. Then the pair of them stood gazing at
their victim for a moment, and the Professor had his first opportunity
in all that bewildering night of discovering what kind of beings he had
to deal with.
Melba was a stout, rather pasty-faced young man, with fat cheeks and
blue, protuberant eyes, not ill-natured. He had very light, straight
hair, and his face in repose seemed to clothe itself with a half smile
which was permanent. It was surprising that such a figure should have
that strength of forearm which the Philosopher had unfortunately
experienced. But there is no telling a man till he strips, and
Melba, who might very well have been a young lounger of the French
Boulevards, was, as a matter of fact, an oarsman of an English
University. He rowed. It was his chief recreation. He also read French
novels, and was a fair hand at writing mechanical verse. But that is
by the way, nor could the Professor as yet guess anything of this. He
glared at the youth over his gag and took him in.
Jimmy was quite another pair of shoes. He was tall also, but clean cut
and very dark, with the black eyes and hair and fresh colouring of a
Gael. No trace of his native accent remained with him. Indeed, he had
been born south of the border, but his supple strength and the balance
of his body were those of the mountains. He had race. Unlike his
colleague, he looked as strong as he was. Jimmy, if you care to know
it, did not row; he swam and dived. He swam and dived with remarkable
excellence, and was the champion, or whatever it is called, of some
district or other of considerable size. He was also of the University
that had nourished Melba—Cambridge.
These two young men, a little blown, and perhaps a little excited, but
manfully concealing their emotions under a gentlemanly indifference,
seated themselves on either side of a table with the Professor gagged
and bound upon the chair before them. So seated, they watched their
prey.
Melba slowly filled an enormous pipe from an enormous pouch, keeping
his round, blue eyes fixed and ready for any movement upon the
Professor’s part.
Jimmy lit a black cigarette with some affectation, blew a cloud of
thin, blue smoke, and addressed the prisoner—
“Before we come to business, Brassington,” he said, “how will you
behave if we ungag you?”
An appreciative and pacifist lowing proceeded from the gag.
“That’s all very well,” broke in Melba in his falsetto, “last time you
said that you broke your word!”
“Wmmmmmm!” replied the Professor, shaking his head in emphatic negation.
“Yes, but you did,” continued Melba shrilly. “You tried to kick Jimmy,
and you tried to kick me, too, after I dumped you.”
Jimmy waved his hand at Melba, commanding silence.
“Look here, sir,” he said, “we had to do it. We don’t like it, and in a
way we’re sorry; but we _had_ to.”
The Professor recalled all that he had read of lunacy in its various
forms (and that was a great deal more than was good for him), but he
could see no trace of insanity in either of the two faces before him.
If anything, the innocence of youth which they betrayed, coupled with
an obviously strained and unnatural determination, was quite the other
way.
Melba chimed in with his high voice again—
“And lucky you didn’t get something worse!”
“Don’t, Melba!” said Jimmy authoritatively.
He was evidently the moderate man of the two, the man of judgment,
and instinctively the learned victim determined to lean upon him in
whatever incongruous adventures might threaten.
“We _had_ to do it,” continued Jimmy, “because there wasn’t any law.
Mind you, we haven’t done this without asking! But when there isn’t any
law you have to take the law into your own hands, haven’t you, Melba?”
he said, turning to his accomplice.
“Yes,” piped Melba, “civil and criminal. He ought to have a lathering.”
His blue, prominent eyes had a glare of ferocity in them, and
Professor Higginson hated him in his heart.
Jimmy again assumed control.
“If there had been a law, sir, we’d have sued you. We are sorry” (this
repetition a little pompously) “and we do not want to expose you.
Personally,” he added, flicking the ash from his cigarette and putting
on the man-of-the-world, “I find it an ungrateful thing to constrain an
older man. But it will all be over soon, and what is more, we will do
it decently if you pay like a gentleman.”
At the word “pay” Professor Higginson’s inexperience of the world
convinced him that he was in the hands of criminals. He had read in
certain detective stories how criminals were not, as some imagined, men
universally deprived of collars, clad in woollen caps and armed with
bludgeons, nor without exception of the uncultivated classes. He could
remember many cases (in fiction) of the gentleman-criminal, nay, of the
precocious gentleman-criminal—and apparently these were of the tribe.
For the second time that evening he came to a rapid decision and
determined to pay.
He had upon him thirty shillings in gold, it was a sovereign and
half-sovereign, in the right-hand waistcoat pocket of his evening
clothes, and he thought he also had in the right-hand trousers pocket a
few loose shillings and coppers. It was a great deal to sacrifice. For
all he knew, it was compounding a felony; but he would risk that. He
would think of it as a rather high hotel bill—and he would be free! He
nodded his gagged head, mooed cheerfully, and looked acquiescent with
his eyes.
“That’s right!” said Jimmy, greatly relieved (for in his heart he had
never dared hope for so easy a solution). “That’s right!” and he sighed
contentedly. “That’s right,” he repeated for the third time. “We are
really very sorry, sir! But it’ll seem all right afterwards. When you
have kept your side of the bargain we shall _certainly_ keep ours.” He
said it courteously. “All we want is the money, and when we have the
money and you are free, why, sir, I hope you will not grudge us what we
have done.”
So it was all going to end happily after all? The Professor almost felt
himself at liberty again, hurrying home through the night—hurrying
anywhere at his free will, loosed from that accursed place, when Jimmy
added—
“Of course, you will have to sign the letter?”